By Christina Blizzard

My family comes from Kingston-Upon-Hull, a hardscrabble seaport on the northeast coast of England. More commonly known as Hull, it’s a place the rest of Britain tends to look down on and mock. It’s not pretty. It’s gritty.

It has, however, a storied maritime history as one of the most important seaports in England and the connection point for goods and passengers from around the world to the U.K. It was especially well placed to take advantage of the lucrative Baltic and northern European trade.

For me, the city with a maritime culture and a reputation for plain speaking has always held an endless fascination. As a child, I was mesmerized by its seafaring history. It has streets with wonderful,  evocative names, like the Land Of Green Ginger. They take you far from the confines of the narrow, twisting streets to an exotic world that once brought ships laden with strange foods and spices to its docks. Or so it seemed to me.

Quite apart from that mercantile legacy, it’s probably the only city in England that celebrates an abolitionist with a statue.  William Wilberforce is Hull’s favourite son. The city known for the best fish and chips in England is also the birthplace of the man whose lifelong mission was the campaign to bring about the end of the slave trade.  And the people of Hull quietly celebrate that remarkable accomplishment to this day.

Born in Hull in 1759, Wilberforce represented that city in Parliament for many years, before taking on a less demanding seat in his later years.

William Hague is a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and a one-time leader of the Opposition. His biography, Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of the man who was the driving force behind the movement to end the slave trade.

Wilberforce was a deeply religious man and he drew on his Christian faith as the impetus for his lifelong mission.  At an early age, he caused great distress to his mother when he converted from his cradle Anglicanism to a more evangelical Methodist faith.  As a politician, Wilberforce was well liked and respected. He was highly influential in the government of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, who shared his view that the slave trade must end. Wilberforce never aspired to be in cabinet and the power he accrued was through his personal charisma and his single-minded drive to end the evil trade.

Hague provides interesting insight into the issue of Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, and his controversial amendment to one of Wilberforce’s parliamentary motions to end the slave trade.

Hague describes how Dundas was, in effect, second in command to Pitt and so close to the prime minister that it is unlikely he would have made any parliamentary move without Pitt’s knowledge and consent.

While Wilberforce was the high-minded idealist, Dundas was the ultimate political tactician. Wilberforce clung to the noble idea that the slave trade should be abolished immediately, although even he recognized the emancipation of those already enslaved was not likely to happen.  He persisted despite numerous roadblocks. One of the biggest setbacks the abolitionist movement faced in the late 18th century was the French Revolution, which sent shock waves through European governments, which saw abolitionism as a revolutionary cause. Also, complex and competing forces loathed Wilberforce and his supporters and rejected his moves to legislate an end to the trade, fearing it would damage their commercial interests.  Still, he persisted and returned to Parliament with another proposal in 1792.

Pitt, for his part, argued valiantly in favour of Wilberforce’s campaign. Hague points out that Pitt must have known about Dundas’s amendment to make abolition a gradual process. Wilberforce had tried, and failed, again and again to bring an immediate halt to the trade. Dundas was a consummate political strategist. He put forward a “second best” solution.

“This author [Hague] has argued elsewhere that Dundas would not have acted as he did without prior consultation with Pitt. Pitt and Dundas were simply too close, in the hourly conduct of government business and the nightly consumption of serious quantities of port, to take part in the same debate without discussing it in advance. This is not to imply that Pitt was in agreement with what Dundas now proposed, but it is probably fair to assume that he regarded it as the second best solution which would achieve the ultimate objective of abolition while ending the divisive debates about it in the meantime. For what Dundas proposed was simple in language and beguiling, for the majority of MPs, who were torn between the undeniable case against the slave trade on the one hand, and their fears of the immediate consequences of its abolition on the other. He moved that the word ‘gradually’ be inserted into Wilberforce’s motion for abolition, his object being ‘gradually and experimentally to prove the practicability of the abolition of the trade, and to provide the means of cultivation, to increase the population and to evince that all the alarms which were now entertained of danger from the measure were ill-founded.’”

Dundas’s amendment broke the logjam of conflicting interests. It allowed those who feared the economic impacts to be reassured that it would be done over time. The slave trade was intrinsic to the economy not just in Britain, but in the Caribbean and other British colonies. It was feared that abruptly halting it would bring about an economic collapse, especially since the slave trade continued in other nations. Others feared abolition would fuel the aspirations of radical and revolutionary factions in Britain.

While there has been criticism of Dundas for “prolonging” the slave trade by four years, the counter argument – made compellingly by Hague – is that without his compromise, the parliamentary wrangling would have continued, as it did elsewhere in the  world, perhaps for decades.

The picture Hague draws of Dundas is not a particularly generous one. He was a hard-nosed wheeler-dealer, who was later accused of turning a blind eye to misuse of Admiralty funds, although there is no suggestion he profited from it.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast Dundas and Wilberforce. On the one hand, Dundas was a power-broker with his hands on the gears of government both domestically and in the colonies. Hague is much more sympathetic to Wilberforce, who was the passionate campaigner, who spoke from the heart. Well-liked and personable, Wilberforce engaged the good and the great through the power of persuasion.  He never held a cabinet post but nevertheless brought about one of the most significant legislative changes in history.

Wilberforce was a genuinely kind, highly principled man who fought ill-health to triumph in his lifelong campaign to end the slave trade.

“Wilberforce was indeed now something of a revered figure, and one of international fame” Hague writes. “An Italian visitor would comment a few years later that, ‘When Mr. Wilberforce passes through the crowd on the day of the Opening of Parliament, everyone contemplates this little old man, worn with age, and his head sunk upon his shoulders, as a sacred relic; as the Washington of humanity.’”

Hague doesn’t mention it in his book, but of interest to Canadians is that John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, who served from 1791–96, was appointed by Pitt on the recommendation of Dundas, who was deeply involved with colonial governance. Simcoe, like Dundas and Wilberforce, was a committed abolitionist.  It was under his tenure as Lieutenant-Governor that the Upper Canada Assembly passed the Act Against Slavery in 1793, the first legislation to limit slavery in the British Empire. That legislation helped establish a safe haven in Canada for runaway slaves from the U.S.

Hague’s book is a great read and a wonderful resource for anyone looking for insights into the machinations of the politics behind the long battle to end the slave trade.